The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit.  And the element of spirit is eternity.  To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent.  A man is a god in ruins.  When men are innocent, life shall be longer and shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams.  Infancy is the perpetual Messiah which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.  The problem of restoring to the world the original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul.  The ruin that we see when we look at Nature is in our own eye.  Man cannot be a naturalist until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.  Love is as much its demand as perception.  When a faithful thinker shall kindle science with the fire of the holiest affection, then will God go forth anew into the creation.

Nature is not fixed, but fluid.  Spirit alters, moulds, makes it.  The immobility, or bruteness, of Nature is the absence of spirit.  Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven.  What we are, that only can we see.  All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do.  Adam called his house heaven and earth; Caesar called his house Rome; you, perhaps, call yours a cobbler’s trade, a hundred acres of ploughed land, or a scholar’s garret.  Yet, line for line, and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.  Build, therefore, your own world.  As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.

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EPICTETUS

DISCOURSES AND ENCHEIRIDION

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born about 50 A.D., at Hierapolis, in Phrygia, at that time a Roman province of Asia Minor, and was at first a slave in Rome.  On being freed he devoted himself to philosophy, and thereafter lived and taught at Nicopolis, in Epirus (then a portion of Macedonia, corresponding to Albania to-day), from about 90 A.D. to 138 A.D.  He left no works, but his utterances have been collected in four books of “Discourses” or “Dissertations” by his pupil and friend Arrian.  In the “Encheiridion Epictete”—­a “Handbook to Epictetus” compiled and condensed from the chaos of the almost verbatim “Discourses”—­Arrian gives the most authentic account of the philosophy of the Greek and Roman Stoics, the sect founded by Zeno about 300 years before the Christian era, which flourished until the decline of Rome.  Arrian himself was born about 90 A.D. at Nicomedia.  He wrote in the style of Xenophon the “Anabasis of Alexander,” a book on “Tactics,” and several histories which have been lost.  He is chiefly of note, however, as the Boswell of Epictetus.  He died about 180 A.D.

I.—­OF THE WILL, AND OF GOD